Pick a Gender

Today, two comics which embrace gendered stereotypes without actually keying in on gender. That is, they both struck me as sexist-ish, but then I recognized that gender, while invoked implicitly, was explicitly left out of the equation. Still embracing gendered stereotypes? Hmmm...

First, Mr. Boffo has a backseat driver:

I had to take a closer look at the person in the backseat to realize that there seems to be some (purposeful?) gender ambiguity there. It's interesting to note that women in Mr. Boffo tend to be variations on a theme of tall, pretty, skinny white women with ponytails, so it may even be more likely that the person in the backseat is meant to be a guy (I doubt Mr. Boffo understands that there are myriad genders, so I'm going binary in my discussion of it). My first reaction is now nixed by a mixed reaction. More importantly, this ain't one of the funniest strips I've seen.

Next up, one of my new-ish favorite strips, Savage Chickens, takes on the whole men-want-sex-women-want-love trope:
Thing is, these both seem to be hens, not roosters. So am I projecting the stereotypes? Maybe. Or perhaps, to give Savage Chickens more credit, Doug Savage, who writes and draws the strip, is defying the stereotype, and just commenting on how sometimes people (chickens) want different things than they profess to want. Or maybe he just doesn't know how to draw a rooster? Or maybe they're both roosters, and he can't draw hens? Or maybe he's a gender outlaw, and purposefully doesn't draw gender in at all...?